CAN has joined forces with UAL Creative Computing Institute to present the first in a series of events that examine new forms of cross-disciplinary art and design practice. Entitled Document 1., it’s comprised of a workshop, seminar, and symposium, and takes place March 11th–13th at UAL’s newly refurbished Camberwell College of Art in London. Whether we are creating digital media, visualizing…

Created by Bjørn Karmann and Tore Knudsen, Alias is a teachable “parasite” that is designed to give users more control over their smart assistants, both when it comes to customisation and privacy. Through a simple app the user can train Alias to react on a custom wake-word/sound, and once trained, Alias can take control over your home assistant by activating it for you.…

Created by Michael Sedbon, Alt-C is an installation that uses electricity produced by plants to power a single board computer mining a cryptocurrency. The project questions our relationship to ecosystems in regards to networked technologies and abstraction problematics. During the photosynthesis process, green plants release sugars and organic matters in the soil. These nutrients will then be digested by bacterias releasing electrons. As…

Created by Media & Interaction Design students at ECAL during a one week workshop led by Thibault Brevet, The Center for Counter-Productive Robotics is a collection of experiments where a robot was programmed to perform counter-productive tasks, with intention to develop a more human-centric approach to automation and robotics. "In this day and age, robots are presented as the embodiment of precision, speed…

Created bu Jonghong Park at the University of the Arts Bremen (Digital Media Program), the installation ‘bit’ represents a natural random process based on the principle of a Markov chain. Each machine consists of "information" engraved on the read head and an "event" caused by the operation of the motor. Linked together using a Markov chain algorithm, one can predict which of the four…

Created by Madeline Gannon for the 2018 Annual Meeting of New Champions at the The World Economic Forum, in Tianjin, China, Manus is a set of ten industrial robots that are programmed to behave like a pack of animals. While each robot moves independently, they share the same central brain. So instead of acting in isolation, they have intertwined behaviors that ripple through the group as people walk…

Created by Ralf Baecker, Putting The Pieces Back Together Again is an artistic investigation and meditation about complex systems and scientific methodology. Consisting of 1250 stepper motors arranged in a two dimensional grid, each motor in the installation moves in a random direction, sometimes intersecting and reversing direction, producing emergent constellations and behaviours. Each motors is equipped with a pointer made from white acrylic…

Created by Adrien Kaeser at ECAL (Media and Interaction Design Unit), Weather Thingy is a custom built sounds controller that uses real time climate-related events to control and modify the settings of musical instruments. The device consists of two main parts, a weather station on a tripod microphone, and a custom built controller connected to the weather station. The station has 3 climate sensors including a rain gauge,…

Created by Giulio Barresi at ECAL (Media and Interaction Design Unit), Connected Tools is a series of objects that explore alternative rituals that could lead to a more reasonable consumption of mobile technologies. Opposite to software solutions (Apple's iOS 12 update), these hardware devices are designed to create a physical distance between the smartphones and the user. The first tool in the Connected Humans collection is x01 Focus…

Created by the team at MIT Media Lab's Meditated Matter Group, Fiberbots is a digital fabrication framework fusing cooperative swarm robotic manufacturing with abilities to generate highly sophisticated material structures. The framework can enable design and digital fabrication of large-scale structures with high spatial resolution leveraging mobile fabrication nodes, or robotic ‘agents’. Some of nature’s most successful organisms collaborate in a swarm fashion. Nature’s…

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CAN has joined forces with UAL Creative Computing Institute to present the first in a series of events that examine new forms of cross-disciplinary art and design practice. Entitled “Document 1.”, it’s comprised of a workshop, seminar, and symposium, and takes place March 11th–13th at UAL’s Camberwell College of Art in London.

Created by Soonho Kwon, Harsh Kedia and Akshat Prakash, Anti-Drawing Machine project explores possible alternatives of how we engage with robots today—instead of purely utilitarian and precise, Anti-Drawing Machine is a robot that can be whimsical and imperfectly characteristic.

Created by SHI Weili, For this project, Terra Mars is a speculative visualisation by an ANN (artificial neural network) to generate images that resemble satellite imagery of Earth modelled on topographical data of Mars. Terra Mars suggests a new approach to creative applications of artificial intelligence—using its capability of remapping to broaden the domain of […]

Created by Radical Norms, 100% Chair is an exploratory project speculating on on the near future where humans and smart machines live, learn and work together. The project explores a design processes that consider Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) as a collaborator and a stakeholder. In the first of series of explorations, the team are looking at […]

Created by Michael Sedbon, Alt-C is an installation that uses electricity produced by plants to power a single board computer mining a cryptocurrency. The project questions our relationship to ecosystems in regards to networked technologies and abstraction problematics.

Created at ECAL during a one week workshop led by Thibault Brevet, The Center for Counter-Productive Robotics is a collection of experiments where a robot was programmed to perform counter-productive tasks, with intention to develop a more human-centric approach to robotics.

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About a year ago, HOLO 2 came rolling off the press. Twelve months of shipping magazines, reading reviews, and touring festivals later, the jury is in. Facts, figures, voices—and a tease: A year is an eternity on the internet. Even at their most inspiring (or troubling), news has an average lifespan of a few days or weeks—at most. The release of a magazine is…

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CAN has joined forces with UAL Creative Computing Institute to present the first in a series of events that examine new forms of cross-disciplinary art and design practice. Entitled “Document 1.”, it’s comprised of a workshop, seminar, and symposium, and takes place March 11th–13th at UAL’s Camberwell College of Art in London.

A-B-Z-TXT is back—and our favourite summer typography school is looking for international applicants. Apply to join Jürg Lehni, Mindy Seu, Jon Gacnik and others in Toronto Aug 23-26 for four days of masterclasses, workshops, and lectures.

Bruce Sterling and Benjamin Bratton speaking about many things design at SciArc, from future speculations in 1918, the relationships between industrial designers and science fiction, architecture, risk as design's vehicle…

As a part of the Platform Games at Babycastles exhibition, Patrick LeMieux provides this analysis and critique of Cory Arcangel's 'Super Mario Clouds'. "In didactic texts, artist talks, personal websites, and private interviews…